Yamamoto Plastics: A Comparison
by Al Pugh

Tell you what, I’m a little nervous about writing this report. I guess by now, everybody knows I'm on Yamamoto's Inside Line Pro Staff because I write for Yamamoto’s Inside Line magazine, and we have all seen the Yamamoto banner on the message page. Anybody with sense enough to come in out of the rain would have at least a question in his or her mind about how objective I am going to be. No, let’s be really straight, the question would be about how honest I am going to be. It’s a legitimate thought; I would hold nothing against anybody who wondered that.

The truth of the matter is that the editor of Inside Line would drop me like a hot potato if I took to lying for Yamamoto. That includes the kind of lies that aren’t technically lies but are really lies anyway. That’s really the second consideration, though. The first is that I have to be able to look in the mirror every morning and not get sick at the reflection of a guy that sold out his father’s advice, "The only thing I can give you to leave home with is a clean name, son. It’s up to you to keep it."

The other consideration is the folks I am associated with on the Inside Line Pro Staff. Cap’n Chuck (who you know or are learning to know), Stan Scott (a great river smallie man from Washington state), little Pat Xiques (don’t try to say it, you’ll hurt yourself), Brian Sak (a very fine writer and marine biologist), Russ Comeau (you’ve probably already read him at http://bassdozer.com, he’s Bassdozer), Ken Smith, Lunker Larry Hemphill, Jamie Cyphers, and I all met up this October at Yamamoto’s place and went fishing together. I’m still just enough of an old-fashioned football player to believe that what one person does reflects on the team, and we are a team of writers. In the same way, the staff here is a team. If I lie, even in some sideways fashion, I still reflect the lie on them, and they don’t deserve that.

With that said, here we go.

Look, there ain’t no magic baits. I guess we all know that, but somehow, we still seem to look for one. Just in case it exists and nobody told us, I guess. Until this spring, I had pretty much decided that all plastics were the same. I hadn’t found a reason for trying anything new for some time. I kind of liked the idea of going to the river with shirt pockets for tackle boxes. Other than single curly-tail grubs and the occasional crawdad, what else did a person need?

Then last winter, I discovered the internet and the smallmouth fishermen on it. I was bombarded with all sorts of new information and ideas. One of the ones I really liked was soft plastic twitch baits (I don’t call them "jerk baits", jerking them isn’t my best method) like Sluggos and Flukes. It was different and it made sense. So, this spring, fishing with a new fellow who has now become a pretty good friend, I tried them. They worked, and they worked like it made sense they should.

My tackle box pockets got a little smaller.

Then, on another outing with another person I met on the internet, they got smaller yet. "You ever use tubes?" His question was innocent enough, and we all know the outcome. I caught fish on them, and the pockets weren’t enough anymore. I needed a vest to hold all my goodies.

Then came the fatal question, "Would you think about writing some stories for Inside Line?" It was the editor of Gary Yamamoto Custom Baits’ Inside Line magazine asking the question I never imagined I’d hear. Not that I had dreamed of it, you understand. I didn’t even imagine it was possible, and certainly not as quickly as it happened. Now, I assumed at that point that I was to write exclusively about Yamamoto products and that Inside Line was fundamentally an advertising vehicle. Boy, was I ever wrong.

To make a long story short, Yamamoto made it possible for me to compare the baits I had been using to Yamamoto baits and they made it crystal clear that I was under no pressure whatever to "be sure the outcome was right." What they were very clear about was that if my integrity was not strong enough to prevent slanting the results, I wasn’t the right person for them.

The Plan
I started by pairing each of my regular baits with a corresponding Yamamoto bait. Grub for grub, and craw for craw, that part was easy. Then, I paired tubes with Ikas, it seemed they were most similar, and twitch baits were paired with Senkos, Yamamoto’s twitch bait.

The idea was to establish the presence of a pod of smallies, and switch back and forth between the baits that were paired together. Doing this enough times would yield a data base of results that was large enough to be a legitimate basis for conclusions. This would produce numerical data that would lend itself to comparison analysis. Being an engineering technician in the testing and measurement field (predictive maintenance), I have at least a basic understanding of this analysis, and I felt well prepared.

Nearly immediately, it became obvious that my plan had not included all contingencies. First, I could not guarantee the exact same availability of the pod of smallies to each bait. These pods don’t just sit still like a panel of people sampling different cereals. A 6-foot movement of the pod created different opportunities for success and failure on successive casts. Then, there was the problem of identifying which casts were test casts and which were searching for the pod after a small movement. Both of these problems can be averaged out of affecting the outcome too much by taking more and more samples, that is making more and more casts. Sounded good to me, but I have to make a living to support this fishing habit, and there was just not enough time to get that large a number of samples. Essentially, I would have had to make 30 to 50 trips per bait to be sure that I had enough data to average out these uncertainties. That’s 300 to 500 fishing trips.

The most damaging uncertainty, however, was that the fish just don’t "handle" the Yamamoto plastics like they do other plastics. I caught several small fish, for instance, without the hook in their mouth. They just wouldn’t let go of the Yami. Then I learned that the hooks I was using had a material problem, and I realized that this was another uncertainty. Was a hooked but lost fish a "success" for the purposes of the test? All of this led me to conclude that what I really should try to discover was whether or not the Yamamotos had more strikes, believing that my ability to set the hook was not the responsibility of the bait. On the other hand, the tendency of the fish to hang on longer is the "responsibility" of the bait, and should be measured.

Bottom line, the data is too flawed for meaningful mathematical analysis. I would like to give you my opinions, though. They don’t have the weight of statistical proof, but they have the weight of the impression created on a skeptic who has been fishing since 1959 and has no axe to grind either way.

General
Overall, Yamamoto baits produced about 20% more strikes this year for me than other baits. I found a large difference in whether the bait was drifted/deadsticked or worked, that is, swimming, hopping, etc. This difference was recognized too late to equalize the amount of time using each tactic, so the overall is skewed somewhat toward the worked bait tactic. Drifting or deadsticking Yamamoto baits produced nearly twice the strikes the same tactic did with non-Yamamoto baits. Working Yamamoto baits produced a few more strikes than the other baits, but given the large margin for error, I would have to call it about even.

On the other hand, my catch to strike ratio was noticeably higher with Yamamoto baits than with the other baits. It is only fair to point out, though, that when I improved my hook quality, that this difference was not as pronounced, although it was still higher.

Grubs
Since I did not previously use hula grubs or twin tails, these were not included in the test. Overall, Yamamoto single tail grubs outproduced the others by a noticeable amount. One thing that I did notice is that the fish would return to a Yamamoto grub after letting it go far more than occurred with the other grubs. That is, after losing a fish on a Yamamoto, a second strike was far more likely. The strike feels different to me on Yamamotos, as well. A grub strike on the other grubs (Kalin and S&W) is a distinct thump. Hard or soft, it is a thump. On the Yamamotos, it is more of a "pull", creating the first impression that I had not seen or felt the strike, and the fish was already swimming away with it.

Craws
Worked craws produced about the same number of strikes with and without Yamamotos. Drifted craws produced far more strikes on Yamamotos than on other baits (mostly Zooms, some micro-pours). Return strikes were about even on each, and the catch to strike ratio was slightly higher with Yamamotos.

Tubes and Ikas
Since tubes can take an insert head and Ikas cannot, this method was not used. Both baits were conventionally texsposed. Worked baits were about even on both results and catch to strike ratio. Drifted baits produced results showing Yamamoto only slightly ahead in strikes, but definitely ahead in catch to strike ratio.

Twitch baits
I was very surprised by this part of the test. Since I don’t work twitch baits, only drifting and deadsticking was considered. The Yamamoto baits were about even with the others for larger baits with respect to strikes, and not enough testing got done to give any sort of meaningful catch to strike ratio results. However, on the smaller baits, the Yamamoto 9S Senko clearly shone. In this one case, I have to suspect angler preference. I tried not to do it, but I must admit that I probably had more confidence in this bait, and may have fished it differently. In the low, ultra-clear conditions of this summer, casting the 9S was like shooting a gun. With less than no effort, this thing flew far and fine. I never used a two handed cast for fear of global circumnavigation, since I had no clearance for certain airspaces.

So there you have it, in all its flawed and incomplete glory. I have refrained from giving more exact numbers, since they would appear "final" and give a too-concrete impression.

So, do Yamamoto plastics catch more fish than other plastics? They did this year for me. Whether or not they will for anyone else is still up for debate. There are no guarantees, but I think it is likely that they will, and in my opinion, they are definitely worth the try.

Yamamoto Custom Baits